One of my customers has been running the debug version of the Litespeed web server for several years now. He initially switched to it while troubleshooting issues a few years ago, and since everything has been stable, he never went back to the release version. Even during a recent upgrade, he explicitly chose to install the debug version again, simply because it had always worked fine for him.
I recently suggested switching to the release version for better performance, but his response was essentially:
"Performance is perfectly fine — no need to touch things that are working."
That got me thinking — does running the debug version actually have a measurable performance impact?
Is it compiled with fewer optimizations (e.g. without -O2 or -O3), additional logging overhead, or other differences that could affect runtime speed or memory usage?
Or is the difference negligible in practice, especially if debugging output is disabled?
Would love to hear from anyone with insight into how Litespeed's debug vs release builds differ.
I recently suggested switching to the release version for better performance, but his response was essentially:
"Performance is perfectly fine — no need to touch things that are working."
That got me thinking — does running the debug version actually have a measurable performance impact?
Is it compiled with fewer optimizations (e.g. without -O2 or -O3), additional logging overhead, or other differences that could affect runtime speed or memory usage?
Or is the difference negligible in practice, especially if debugging output is disabled?
Would love to hear from anyone with insight into how Litespeed's debug vs release builds differ.
